Amazing Alex

~ the obituary ~

Angry Birds was on every phone in Turkey by 2012, including the phones of people who did not otherwise play games. Its follow-up was on almost none of them. Amazing Alex scored 75 on Metacritic and launched worldwide with the most famous mobile studio on earth behind it, and it was off both app stores inside three years.

Rovio's CEO Mikael Hed announced it on Yle's breakfast television in May 2012, which tells you how large Rovio was in Finland at the time. It shipped on 12 July 2012 for iOS and Android, with a Windows Phone version on 3 April 2013. The game itself was a reworking of Casey's Contraptions, an iPad puzzler Rovio had bought, rebuilt around a new character and pushed out through the distribution machine that Angry Birds had paid for.

The character was Alex, a curious kid who liked building contraptions, and the job was to put household objects in a room so that a ball released at the top would arrive where you wanted it. You placed the objects and then started the timer, and physics did the rest. There were three stars per level to collect and a level editor so players could build and share their own.

~ the case file ~

~ the contraption ~

This genre was not new in 2012 and the reviews said so. Amazing Alex was repeatedly measured against The Incredible Machine, which had shipped in 1993 and had already taught a generation that the pleasure here is watching a chain you designed go off without you. Harry Slater at Pocket Gamer called it an addictive experience and then noted that compared to Angry Birds it had less excitement in it, which is a polite way of saying the thing works and does not grab you.

Part of that is the physics. A bird fired at a tower is one action with an unpredictable result, and you can play it in four seconds while waiting for a bus. A Rube Goldberg machine is a planning exercise, and planning needs a quiet room and more than four seconds.

~ what Rovio was trying to prove ~

In 2012 the question about Rovio was whether it was a studio or a franchise. Angry Birds had sold on a scale nobody in mobile had seen, and the company was expanding into plush toys and animation. A second original hit would have settled the argument.

Amazing Alex did not settle it. Rovio's next decisions went the other direction: Bad Piggies later that year used the same engine and the same cast, and by 2014 the release list was almost entirely birds. The studio laid off staff in 2014 and again in 2015, the same stretch in which Alex quietly came off the shelves.

~ the day it came off the shelves ~

On 13 April 2015 the game disappeared from the App Store and from Google Play at once. There was no announcement and no shutdown notice, because there was nothing to shut down. It was a paid single-player game with no servers, which means every copy that had been bought kept working on the device it was on until an OS update broke the binary.

That is the quietest way a game can die, and it is now the most common one. Nothing breaks. The thing simply stops being purchasable, and the people who paid for it in 2012 find out years later, when they restore a phone from a backup and it is not in the list.

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